January 24, 2012

The zodiac, your horoscope, tea leaves...people have been trying to make sense of human attributes since the dawn of dirt. Corporations pay big money to navigate these muddied waters and will train employees to better understand personality types to harness them for productivity. I recently revisited one such matrix, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which hypothesizes that it’s possible to distill human characteristics into 16 personality types. David Keirsey later mapped these types into four general temperaments: the Artisan, Rational, Guardian and Idealist.

I jokingly wondered if these metrics have ever been applied to an expedition setting; exhaustion, hunger, and cold, wet conditions can quickly strip insulate layers of city life, exposing our reptilian ids. What may seems like "character" over coffee can reveal itself in spades below the crux. I began to contemplate my past adventures and consider what I could glean from temperament theory to apply toward my own trips. Here’s what I found. Keep reading for discussions with ultrahiker Andrew Skurka, mountain biker Rebecca Rusch, and veteran adventure racer Michael Tobin about their "types."

December 02, 2011

If you’ve ever ridden a bike on the pavement at Arches National Park or Yellowstone, you know how liberating it can be. Cars are often jammed on roads that weren’t designed for the freeway-like crush that hits parks every summer, but on a bike you can cruise at a comfortable pace. And just like riding anywhere else, you’re more a part of the scenery, not walled off from it. But the current transportation reauthorization bill worming its way through Congress could make it illegal to ride a bike on any federal road that has a pathway running parallel to it, not just those within national parks.

If no parallel, alternative pathway exists, cyclists would have a right to the road. Reassured? Don’t be.

Two years ago Scottish street trials rider Danny MacAskill was just a guy working a nine-to-five job as a mechanic in an Edinburgh bike shop, crafting his vision of what was possible on a bicycle in the hours after work. In March 2009, he took a risk and left his job to pursue riding full time. A month later his roommate, Dave Sowerby, released a video of MacAskill leaping, flipping, and balancing across Edinburgh’s famous buildings, parks, and back alleys on his bike. No one had seen riding like this before.

The video went viral. First friends and then total strangers forwarded it via email and posted it on Facebook. MacAskill’s audacity, skill, and grace spoke to people, even those who had never heard of the obscure sport of street trials, where bicyclists use existing structures to create physical puzzles that are solved by moving from obstacle to obstacle. Some even chalked MacAskill’s mind-bending moves up to a special effects hoax. The video went on to be viewed 27 million times.

MacAskill could have been a one-hit wonder. But when his 2011 short film Industrial Revolutions—which featured him riding through Scotland’s abandoned factories, leaping between train cars, and riding across two-inch beams suspended 15 feet above concrete—generated three million views on YouTube in a month, he proved he wasn’t. What MacAskill can do on a bicycle, his body shifting, pausing, and then exploding upward in a seamless tangle of man and bike, makes us reimagine our daily environments.

Groundbreaking adventure has always made us examine and then redraw the fine line between the possible and the impossible. Like the great performance artist and tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who captured New Yorkers’ attention with his 1974 walk between the towers of the World Trade Center, MacAskill has taken the the landscapes of his everyday and turned mundane into a physical canvas.

Since 2009, MacAskill has used his newfound fame and monetary support to log over 40,000 miles in an RV, traveling across Scotland looking for the perfect trick in the ideal location.

“I never had the goal of being a professional rider,” says MacAskill. “I just wanted to ride my bike.”

June 01, 2011

Last January, NG Adventure writer Tetsuhiko Endo interviewed Scottish biking sensation Danny MacAskill about his phenomenal talent on two wheels, which has become an Internet sensation. Here, get a look at his new video, shot on the streets of Cape Town, South Africa.

May 23, 2011

"Riding on top of Table Mountain was something I had to do," says professional mountain biker Kenny Belaey. "The landscape is just perfect for trials—but I had to be really careful." Belaey pulled out every daredevil trick imaginable, from wheelies to bunny hops, to explore the famous 3,558-foot slab of granite overlooking Cape Town. To reach the top at sunrise, he hiked through the night, carrying his 20-pound bike on his back.

July 15, 2010

Stage 3 of this year’s Tour de France from Wanze to Arenberg Porte du Hainaut shook up the GC standings and rattled the nerves of even the most senior pros amongst the bunch. Toss in a few hard crashes, mechanical meltdowns, and (unfortunately) broken bones along the way and the result was one of the more dramatic early TDF stages in recent memory. The culprit of stage 3’s angst and drama—cobblestones. The route included several short sections of cobbled pavé from the Paris-Roubaix, or “Hell of the North,” which, as its name suggests, is one of the most punishing races on the European calendar.

May 25, 2010

By National Geographic Adventure Contributing Editor Steve Casimiro,
editor of The Adventure Life

To understand the power of the perfect cycling jacket, you need to know that I am not a morning athlete. Once I’ve had a few espressos and the sun’s climbed closer to its zenith than its morning horizon, I start to think about getting the blood going. But generally I’m not in serious motion until early afternoon. Rapha’s drop-dead gorgeousStowaway shell is such a pleasure to wear, however, I find myself getting out of the rack and right on the bike, just so I have an excuse to wear it. Ridiculous, but true.

April 29, 2010

Five years ago I made a choice to go car-free in favor of using a bicycle as my primary source of mobility. Since then, every time I saddle up, I’m 100 percent thrilled to be living this two-wheeled lifestyle. But…what if I didn’t have this
choice?

Earlier this year, I spent two and a half months on photojournalism assignments in India and discovered there are an estimated 300 million Indian people who ride bicycles because they have no other option. This made me wonder: If cycling was not something I did by choice, but was designated by the caste I was born into, would I still love it the same?

To explore that question, I rented one of India’s finest single-speed steeds, an Atlas Redline Super, and spent several days commuting with milkmen and day laborers in rural Rajasthan. I also made 16,000 photos (most of them portraits) of Indian cyclists—brick makers from the untouchable caste, paper boys, homeless children, farmers, mystics, popsicle salesmen, slum dwellers, and more.

As the co-owner of ROW Adventures, Peter Grubb has spent the better part of the past three decades scouting trips around the world. But until recently, he had all but ignored his own backyard, the Bitterroot Mountains straddling the Montana-Idaho border. He wasn’t the only one—very few outfitters lead trips here. And yet, the 10,000-foot peaks’ boulder fields and U-shaped valleys are loaded with lakes, hot springs, wildlife (lynx, bald eagles, wolves), and a rich history (Native Americans, fur traders, and Lewis and Clark all came through here). On ROW’s new Bitterroots Multisport trip, you’ll cycle the 50-mile Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes along the old Milwaukee Railroad line, kayak an alpine lake, raft the Clark Fork River’s Class III rapids, and bike over train trestles spanning deep canyons on the Hiawatha Trail.

More than six million tourists flocked to the Four Corners region in 2008, making a beeline for the sandstone rock formations and ancestral Puebloan dwellings at places like Arches National Park and Mesa Verde. Hovenweep National Monument, meanwhile, saw just 25,411 visitors. “Hovenweep’s one of the more remote areas left in the country,” says Western Spirit Cycling president Ashley Korenblat. This spring Korenblat’s Moab-based outfit will lead the first commercial biking trip to the monument, which lies some 70 miles east of Cortez, Colorado, at the end of a circuitous country road. Once a major center for the ancestral Puebloans, Hovenweep’s sprawling collection of ruins doubles as a giant outdoor classroom for Native American history buffs. The trip is a kid-friendly affair, with interactive workshops along with double- and singletrack cruising.